Current Research: The National Kidney Foundation estimates that about 350,000 people in the United States have end-stage renal disease, and each year about 67,000 people die from kidney failure. Transplant is the only way to restore continuous kidney function. Problems exist with finding a matching donor and transplant rejection within the patient. Numbers show that only a small percentage of those people in need of transplants actually receive them. The data demonstrates a necessity to find a new supply of kidneys and increase histocompatibility for transplant. My research focuses on the production of a functional kidney for transplant through use of a decellularized porcine kidney scaffold and cells collected from a patient’s kidney biopsy. Characterization of the scaffold and understanding cell attachment is vital to the recellularization process and production of a histocompatible kidney.

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